In accounts of the recent history of the Catholic Church, it is often written that Pope Benedict XVI effectively killed off progressive Latin American liberation theology in the 1980s and 90s, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the chief Vatican watchdog on orthodoxy.
He certainly spelt out in clear terms what he saw as its shortcomings in official documents published in 1984 and 1986, as well as disciplining its leading proponents, but reports of the death of liberation theology were wrong, said Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, the priest credited as the “father of liberation theology”, with its “preferential option for the poor”.
